Speedboat

by Renata Adler

I often meet people who do not like me or each other.

He wrote sometimes: “The first sentence can be like the rapping of a gavel, or it can sidle up to endear itself. It can thump you on the back with fraternal heartiness, or it can tap you for a loan. There are writers like prosecutors, and others with a bedside manner, and others still, with that particular note of instruction which can drive you up the wall. The thing is, I recognize every literary style at once, and I detest them all.”

I was prepared to go to lengths. I guess I overdid it.

I have the shakes a good part of the time (which interferes no end with taking notes).

It would have been kinder, certainly, to let the driver read, the wino sleep. One simply cannot bear down so hard on all these choices.

What is the point. That is what must be borne in mind. Sometimes the point is really who wants what. Sometimes the point is what is right or kind. Sometimes the point is a momentum, a fact, a quality, a voice, an intimation, a thing said or unsaid. Sometimes it’s who’s at fault, or what will happen if you do not move at once. The point changes and goes out. You cannot be forever watching for the point, or you lose the simplest thing: being a major character in your own life.

Otherwise, now and then, a small foray is worthwhile. Just so that being always, complacently, thoroughly wrong does not become the safest position of them all. The point has never quite been entrusted to me.

The problem is this. Hardly anyone about whom I deeply care at all resembles anyone else I have ever met, or heard of, or read about in the literature.

Our paper’s publisher is an intellectual from Baltimore. He has read Wittgenstein;

The Indo-Chinese lesbian restaurant owner, who was holding her fish-sauces cookbook, resumed a dignified, offended silence. The crisp, cold, bracing writer was drunk, and raving to the savage pundit. The French film-archivist was talking, with delight, to the Bulgarian movie personality from California, who was about to sell, in stores across the country, the product of her secret formula for face creams.

As it slammed along, the Italians sat, ever more low and loose, on their hard seats, while the American lady, in her eagerness, began to bounce with anticipation over every little wave. The boat scudded hard; she exaggerated every happy bounce. Until she broke her back.

I find the women I know do tip reasonably and drink a lot. They are all educated women, though—in that age group which learned its courtesies from its own mothers; its loves from Paolo and Francesca, Bronte, Joyce, and even O’Hara; and all the solid enthusiasms in its cast of mind from what we used to emphasize were not anthologies, textbooks, or other secondary works, but from originals, the works themselves. Our ambitions were, nonetheless, what those of any sensible group of women at that time, perhaps at any modern time, ought to have been: to become safe and successful; to marry someone safe and successful; to have for our children some sort of worldly safety and success. From time to time, however, there is something, I don’t know, wistful, about how it has turned out.